Teacups
by MaladyOfReverie
Summary: A forgotten purchase rekindles a flame.


Many believe that true love is a replica of a romance novel: the longing gazes, the tentative brushes of fingers, the reunion of silhouettes against a pink and purple sky, their shadowy hair rimmed with the gold gilt of a setting sun. Of course, very few experience such a love, and those that do almost always find it to be frivolous. The person whose arms you can run to in the fading light of a summer evening is rarely the same person whose mind you can turn to for entertainment when the sky is drab and grey and there are no dramatic embraces to be had. While romance may exist outside of fiction, only the delusional would believe that its resemblance to that fiction could be anything more potent than a vague shadow, or a reflection warped by the ripples of a passing boat.

If anything, love is like a Western. A world exists in perfect harmony, neither incomplete nor disturbed. Then, with a clatter of metal-shod hooves, the dust is churned abruptly into the air and waltzes in the sunlight, new and exciting. The world has changed, and can never be the same again, and as the day drops its blue sky in favour of red, the motes that filter in through open windows, exulting in their own disruption, grow more beautiful still. Yet they cannot stay as they are forever. As every dance must come to an end, so must every mote settle. They settle differently, of course – nothing returns to how it was before, not exactly. Yet to one who had not studied each mote in depth – not tracked their movements nor mapped their progress – the world would seem the same as ever. Just as normal. Just as unspectacular.

So goes love. Gone were the days when Sherlock Holmes, the epitome of the working man, would abandon his work early so as to be home at the arrival of his lover; to be gathered up in frenzied arms and kissed with frenzied lips and ravished atop the kitchen table, petri dishes falling to their untimely deaths as violinist fingers grasped blindly for something to hold on to. Gone were the days when John Watson would trail his lips along the spine of his Adonis on earth, whispering words of adulation to ears too distracted by those lips to hear him. The truth was that they had grown used to one another, as one grows used to furniture. They were the furniture, indeed, of one another's happiness.

Lust had faded like a poorly placed billboard that was seen by too few for anyone to bother renewing it. An accidental knock of knees no longer set their nerves alight, as though that point of contact had united two live wires. They went about their lives almost as they had before that lust was born. They ate breakfast together – or rather, John ate breakfast while Sherlock read from as many newspapers he could in that short space of peacetime before John left for the clinic – his clinic now – and Sherlock attempted not to die of boredom. They drank their tea and coffee together, talked together, laughed together. They were evidently the participants in the most powerful bond of friendship that ever existed, but one might miss the little gold bands on their fingers, or think they promised them to separate men or women, and presume nothing more.

Yet lust and love are not at all the same. Lust is aesthetic, and so it may be painted on a billboard, obsessively or messily or somewhere in between, and that aesthetic quality provides for its gradual decline. Love is something deeper, something infinitely more complex and infinitely more abstract. Such a thing cannot be painted, though many have tried, and so it cannot fade as a billboard can. That is not to say it cannot die, for it can. It can wither; it can curl in upon itself like some pitiful thing and turn again to the dust it was stirred up from. Such was not the case, however, for the inhabitants of 221b Baker Street. Theirs was almost always an unstated love, because it did not need stating. Each knew how much they were loved by the other. They saw it every day. Sherlock saw it in the way John stirred sugar into his coffee. John saw it in the way Sherlock would glance up from his microscope and smile with his eyes. But sometimes, very rarely, they needed reminding.

Their home, as any home will, had grown cluttered over time, which they both resented. Sherlock resented its interruption of the order he maintained within chaos as he resented the presence of the unnecessary which he had always resented within his own mind. John resented the obstacle to his military tidiness, his cultivated desire for everything to have its use and its place. So it was that, one lazy Sunday in July, when the sun filled the flat through its large bay windows and warmed their backs, and dust motes danced in the still air of the room, they began the laborious mission of decluttering the house. They moved purposefully but slowly, enjoying the quietude and togetherness far more than the task itself, and it was not until the afternoon that they drifted into the kitchen, the sitting room still as yet unfinished.

John discovered a box under the sink, and pulled it out. It contained an odd array of mugs and teacups, some given to them as comical or sincere wedding presents, others vestiges of their bachelor existences. The pair that struck John's eye, however, as he placed the box on the counter, were a pair that he had purchased in a market to amuse the man who was then his fiancé. He lifted them carefully out, and dusted them off. Then, without a word, he boiled the kettle, and poured out two cups of tea. Sherlock glanced up from the cupboard he was clearing as John passed him a cup, and smiled, deliberately brushing his fingers against his husband's as he took it. Then he stood up, and leaned against the table while John leaned against the counter opposite him.

John met his eyes, and lifted his cup. 'I love you,' the cup said for him.

Sherlock raised his cup in return. 'I know,' it replied.


End file.
